Congratulations to opera star Renee Fleming, who recently got engaged to corporate lawyer Tim Jessell. The legendary soprano was set up on a blind date with Jessell through author Ann Patchett. The two have managed a long-distance relationship since Fleming lives in New York — she just wrapped up several performances of Rossini’s “Armida” at the Metropolitan Opera — and Jessell lives in Washington, DC. Jessell popped the question after two years of dating. They haven’t started planning their upcoming nuptials, but a friend of Fleming says the couple will probably have a small, family celebration here this fall. In December, Fleming was named a creative consultant to the Lyric Opera in Chicago. She has two children from her first marriage to actor Rick Ross.

The site of one of rock’s most-historic concerts, Watkins Glen International, plays host to the next in a series of notable shows presented by one of the biggest concert draws in rock, Phish.

The jam band’s Super Ball IX is set for Juy 1-3 at the renowned race track in Schuyler County. In 1973, the track was host to a rock festival featuring The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers and The Band. That event drew an estimated 600,000 people, widely considered to be the largest event of its kind ever held in this country.

The first such mega-weekend presented by Phish, The Clifford Ball, drew 70,000 people to an abandoned air force base in Plattsburgh in 1996. The largest of the eight so far was 1999′s “Big Cypress,” which drew 85,000 to the Big Cypress Indian Reservation in Florida.

The next George Eastman Honorary Scholar will be filmmaker Jonas Mekas, alias the Godfather of American Avant-Garde Cinema.

The 89-year-old Lithuanian emigre was co-founder of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and wrote an influential film column in the Village Voice. He was known as a staunch opponent of censorship and a champion of experimental movie making.

The award he’ll receive at George Eastman House at 8 p.m. April 9 is for artistic achievement. (It was previously given to Graham Nash, James Ivory and Jeff Bridges, among others.) The Dryden Theatre ceremony also will feature a screening of Mekas’ film Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania. Admission is $8 ($6 for students). Call (585) 271-3361 or go to www.dryden.eastmanhouse.org.

Every bit as prestigious and far more lucrative is the 2011 Hasselblad Award in Photography, just received by University of Rochester alumnus (and former adjunct faculty member) Walid Raad. The $150,000 prize and gold medal celebrate Raad’s work with The Atlas Group – a project documenting the modern history of Lebanon – and also his innovative ways of dealing with the imagery of war and social conflict.

Yes, you can still have a press conference if that very morning your major piece of news requests her name not be announced just yet. So the biggest piece of news Wednesday afternoon at the Dryden Theatre became the Susan B. Anthony “Failure is Impossible” Award winner will be revealed at a later date.

Otherwise, the 360 | 365 George Eastman House Film Festival laid out the plans for the April 27 through May 7 event, featuring 103 movies, documentaries and shorts, now in its 10th year.

“The programming committee watched over 400 films to come up with our lineup,” said Executive Director John Richardson. They didn’t have to go far to come up with a few of them. Among three treasures pulled from the Eastman House archive is Jazzmania, a 1923 silent film restoration that will be accompanied by the local French cafe swing-jazz combo, The Djangoners.

The former High Falls Film Festival was last year renamed the 360 | 365 George Eastman House Film Festival to denote an event of panoramic vision, every day of the year (although organizers have not yet announced how the name will reflect leap year in 2012). The intention was to move away from a festival that largely defined itself by taking note of women’s contributions in film, in favor of a celebration much wider in scope.

The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra announced today that it would honor Syracuse Symphony Orchestra tickets for the remainder of the season.

The SSO is suspending operations on Monday, laying off all musicians and all but eight staff members, and has canceled the remainder of its concerts this season due to financial woes. The orchestra did not offer refunds to ticket holders.

“It’s incredibly sad to see another Orchestra suspend its operations – especially in our own upstate backyard,” said a statement by Charles Owens, president and CEO of the RPO, in a press release. “We have always valued our relationship with our colleagues and friends within the Syracuse Symphony and our thoughts are with their musicians, patrons, staff, and board during this difficult transition period. We are reaching out with this offer to SSO ticket holders because the RPO believes in the power of music, especially in difficult times, and we want to make sure music lovers in Syracuse have the opportunity to continue to experience great music.”

If you’re a SSO ticket holder, all you need to do is call the Eastman Theatre Box Office at 585-454-2100 to trade-in your SSO ticket for a seat to one of these concerts:

It’s a sad day for Syracuse. The upstate city lost its orchestra, at least for the remainder of the year. The board official decided to suspend the rest of its season, citing lack of operating funds. With all but eight members of the staff — and all musicians — laid off come Monday, the orchestra’s long term future remains in jeopardy.

Personally, I lived in Syracuse for a year and never saw the same community support for the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra as I’ve seen in Rochester towards the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. The SSO never quite figured out a way to become an undeniable fabric of the community, in my opinion.

Despite lack of community support, my heart goes out to the musicians — especially principal oboist Anna Petersen Stearns, who used to play with the RPO before landing the principal oboe job in Syracuse only a short time ago.

The Rochester area has the nation’s highest per capita concentration of deaf and hard-of-hearing residents – a remarkable demographic, approached only by Washington, D.C.

So we’re a natural home for a festival that features films by and about deaf people. For the fourth time, the biennial Deaf Rochester Film Festival is in town for screenings, lectures and discussions running through April 3. Many prominent local institutions will host these events – including George Eastman House, the Little Theatre, Artisan Works, Rochester School for the Deaf and Rochester Institute of Technology.

One of the main attractions will be the 2005 movie Uro (The Long Way Home) by deaf Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiro Ohdate. A mixture of deaf and Japanese culture, it portrays a deaf man who has landed in debt and is suddenly compelled to come to terms with his childhood. It will be screened at 7 p.m. at the Little Theatre, with tickets priced at $25.

Rochester art lovers can witness the building of an intricate, fragile sand mandala this week at The Harley School, 1981 Clover St.

This is a quintessential form of Tibetan Buddhist art, its geometric symbols painstakingly created from colored sand and then ceremonially dismantled to show the impermanence of existence. Two Tibetan monks – Lama Venerable Tenzin Yignyen and Lama Tenzin Norbu – will complete a mandala from 9 a.m. to 2:20 p.m. March 30 and April 1. On April 4, they’ll sweep up the sand and deposit it in Allens Creek as a blessing for the community.

Lama Tenzin may be familiar to some area students as a teacher at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva and as a past mandala maker at the Memorial Art Gallery.

Hollywood loves gossip – and often manufactures it. That’s what’s happening to Sarah Lane, the dance double for Natalie Portman in “Black Swan.” Lane is a dancer in the American Ballet Theater and got her training here in Rochester at the Draper Center.

The article alleges that Lane complained that Fox silenced her about her role in the movie, instead propping up Portman’s dance efforts.

The article uses this quote to back up the assertion: “They were trying to create this facade that she had become a ballerina in a year-and-a-half,” she told Dance Magazine in December. “So I knew they didn’t want to publicize anything about me.”

The 2011 Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival artists have been announced. It looks like it’ll be another euphoric summer of jazz.

One of the most common questions I get is who my jazz festival picks are. Yeah, I usually write an article about it – or mention it somewhere in the newspaper – somewhere along the way to the fest. Plus, Jeff Spevak and I typically write our preview articles on the artists we think deserve special attention.

Sometimes there are clear front runners, based on our individual tastes. But each year there are new names for us to discover, and it takes the next couple of months to sift through information on all the artists, listen to their CDs, to really know who our favorite acts might be. And more often than not, no matter how much preparation we do prior to the festival, we always leave it, nine days later, heralding artists we’d never guessed would be so good.

Jeff Spevak has shaken the hand of Johnny Cash. He has done a shot of whiskey with Bo Diddley. He sang with Tina Turner for 12 seconds. His Top 10 albums of all time include 17 by Bob Dylan. He likes dogs, the Cleveland Indians and wine. His favorite books are Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He likes to eat Chilean sea bass.

Catherine Roberts: Lead Local Editor/Life, is the mother of two teenage boys. She's so used to being overbooked that when there's a spare moment, she feels the needs to know what's going on around town to fill the gap. Favorite things in Rochester include the museums, Red Wings games and concerts. But most of the time, you'll find her and her husband, Chad (the Democrat and Chronicle's overnight editor), at a bowling alley, the sidelines of a ball field or walking a dog in their Irondequoit neighborhood or Durand-Eastman Park. If you have any ideas, please email at cathyr@DemocratandChronicle.com

Diana Louise Carter was born at Rochester General Hospital the same year it opened and reared in Bristol, Ontario County. After college and grad school, her first reporting job was on a small newspaper in Western Massachusetts. She returned to Rochester in late 1987 to work for the Democrat and Chronicle. Carter covers agriculture and banking. She lives in the Upper Monroe neighborhood of Rochester with her husband and three children.

Anna Reguero, a former Democrat and Chronicle music critic, a clarinetist and a graduate of Eastman School of Music, is a doctoral student in musicology at State University of New York at Stony Brook.